


hiraeth

by Goldmonger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Multi, Retrospective, Tragedy, clinging to any sort of continuity by the skin of my teeth, post 15x18, warning: not 15x18 friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:02:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27501991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger
Summary: “What you do means nothing. What I do to you means nothing. How does that feel?”
Relationships: Sam Winchester & Everyone
Comments: 12
Kudos: 48





	hiraeth

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this on friday after downing 3 white claws. visit my [tumblr](https://ronon-dex.tumblr.com/) if you want to see my mental breakdown in real time

He’s looking up at a ceiling, a boy, and four rotating yellow stars. It feels right, somehow, more right than anything.

“Sammy,” says the boy. “Sammy, say ‘Deeean.’”

Sam tries. It’s his favourite word, after all, the word he’s said more than any other, but all that emerges is a soft gurgle.

The boy giggles, almost overcome. He reaches down and pokes Sam’s nose, gently enough not to hurt but firmly enough to garner Sam’s full attention.

“Sammy, say ‘you’re the best brother ever!’”

Sam tries again, spit bubbling out over his chin with the force of his effort. He wants to drape the sentence with sarcasm, wants to be elbowed while a guffaw breaks out of nowhere, full and stinking of beer, or fries, or the slim jims that Sam had been saving since Milwaukee, dammit –

The boy laughs out loud, and just as soon stops, turning towards a sudden light. His childish face is in profile, unfamiliar, the same.

A voice rumbles, harmonising with one lighter, smoother.

“He was crying for me,” Dean complains to these sounds. His fingers curl around bars, and Sam can see now that he is in a cage. Yes, he has always been in this cage.

The deeper voice grunts, and giant hands curve around the boy, lifting him up, away. The boy’s grip on the bars breaks, as he recedes; his eyes are wide. They reflect the yellow of the stars.

Sam kicks, but there’s no resistance. He misses the boy. He grabs for the stars, but meets only air.

“It should have stopped right here,” someone whispers. Sam searches for the source, and sees nothing but darkness. The stars disappear.

*

One day – for all that there are days down here, this far from anything – Lucifer hands him back both his femurs.

“Truce?” he asks, wearing Sam’s smile, and Sam agrees, yes, a truce, because what’s the alternative?

Lucifer crouches, tracing sigils in the soil. Grave dirt, Sam thinks it is, from some cemetery that has been stolen from his memory. Lucifer is obsessed with death, he’s come to realise, particularly his own. He will tap Sam’s shoulder sometimes, several antique weapons in each hand (his hands are big, big enough to crush small things. Sam is now a small thing). Each time, Lucifer asks him: which one can kill an archangel? Angel blade, archangel blade, the Hand of God, the gun of Samuel Colt, a creature made of my seed? All or nothing?

“Are you even listening to me?”

Sam listens to Lucifer. He usually does when Lucifer is talking, because as much as Lucifer loves to talk, he loves having an audience even more. He gets angry when Sam refuses to be his audience. Angry enough that Sam has to watch his femurs exit his legs through the soles of his feet.

“Good,” Lucifer says, sniffing. “We shall be friends, today. I feel like it,” he adds, squinting at Sam, and Sam nods. Being friends is better than being not friends. Mostly.

“My father was here, earlier,” says Lucifer, and he tips from his haunches (Sam’s haunches) to fall neatly on his rear end in the churned-up ground. He slides his feet through the contours of Enochian, stretching like he’d just exerted himself. Sam supposes removing bones can be a tiring business.

“It is tiring,” says Lucifer, languorous in the muck. “Yes. I get tired doing this job and so my father comes down here to check on me. This box is impenetrable to all but Him, you know.”

That can’t be true, Sam thinks, before he can stifle it.

“Oh?” says Lucifer, leaning back, head tilted with interest. Sam’s brain is stubborn, even after decades of lobotomies and resulting sludgy pink oozing down his nostrils. He thinks, again:

The Cage cannot be breached. If God could get in, God would save me.

Lucifer draws himself (Sam’s self) up, resting his elbows on his knees.

“Yet he does not save you,” says Lucifer. He blinks – yellow, white, black. “Why do you think that is?”

Sam waits. He doesn’t know fear from terror from panic any longer, no nuance in the quake that perpetually arrests him. He waits and maybe rocks, like the wind is rushing through him (no wind, though, no relief down here).

“He has spares, Sam. You exist in billions – billions of insignificant little lives, under Him.” Lucifer gazes into the empty distance, light bleeding from his lips, his tear ducts. “As do I,” he says.

No, Sam thinks. No, no, no.

“Hey,” Lucifer chastises, brows furrowing. “You know I hate it when you say that.”

Sam knows. Sam also knows the truce is off. Lucifer is holding his mandible and Sam is looking at it.

_Our Father. Who art in Heaven._

Lucifer takes out his spinal cord next, slurping it like a strand of spaghetti. Sam crumples to the dirty ground in a heap. He watches Lucifer sink into view, askew now that Sam’s on his side, as pliant as jelly.

“You don’t matter.” He strokes his chin. Sam’s chin. There is no difference.

Lucifer is grinning at him, at his slackness. “What you do means nothing. What I do to you means nothing. How does that feel?”

Purgatorial, hellish emptiness that lasts a second and forever, like heaven had, for him. Sam thinks, as his blood is swallowed, surely not. Surely all of this was for something. Surely there was a plan.

*

“Nothing is worth losing you,” says Castiel, his hand in Sam’s hair.

Three years to the day, Castiel abandons him in a cave, throat ravaged from ear to ear by vampire fangs. Sam lies to Mary and Dean later, pretends he’d gone unconscious almost instantly. But he can see his brother, being dragged away by their best friend. It doesn’t make sense, he shouts, but it comes out as a spray of blood. His life drains.

Had there been a reaper? He thinks someone laughed at him.

*

Magda’s body is cold. She’s in the morgue, after all, inside a refrigerated drawer. Why wouldn’t it be cold?

“Sam. That security guard will be back around any second.”

He reassures his brother, yes, yes he knows. Please. Just one minute more. His nails dig into his palms, punishingly. He wants to leave a mark, like stigmata.

He leans closer to the cadaver, and he can see that the bullet hole is small, with neat edges. The job had been clean, almost humane; there had likely been very little suffering for the girl that had already suffered so much, so early in life. She had bled out in seconds, her heart stuttering to a stop after too much fruitless pumping. Perhaps it had been working so hard because it was trying to deliver adrenaline around her body. Perhaps Magda had been preparing to defend herself.

“Sam. You saw that it’s her. Let’s get out of here.”

He says, yeah, of course. He tucks a lock of dark hair behind Magda’s ear. There’s a scar there, jagged, close to the nape of her neck. The remnant of a recent lashing. It’s a washed out pink, he sees, like it had been in the middle of healing when the blood had stopped flowing.

“Sam!”

He closes the drawer and creeps back up the stairs. He sneaks out of the office window of the morgue after his brother, dodging the security guard’s patrol. They slide into the Impala, and Dean asks if he’s all right.

Sam tells him, I’d rather not talk about it. If that’s okay.

*

They’d just saved her from a murderous sailor ghost. Sam doesn’t know why she’s being difficult.

“It’s none of your business,” says Bela sweetly. “That’s why. I’m hanging up now.”

Sam asks her again, harsher. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this outside the motel, with Dean sprawled in their room, oblivious. He only knows that he had seen her face earlier, twisted at the accusation, and it had haunted him. Family-killer, he’d thought, repelled. An ugly title – obscene and especially incomprehensible to him.

(Sam looks at Dean sometimes with binding rituals and soul magic swirling in his head, options he’s explored and exhausted trying to come up with a way to keep his brother alive, beside him. He’d do anything to keep Dean safe. He’d do _anything_. And it was true, the Winchesters had a muddy history with attempted and coerced patricide and fratricide, but no-one was like them. They were uniquely cursed, more unfortunate than most. A civilian would have no excuse.)

“It would serve you well,” says Bela, her voice glacial, “to think outside of the box. You know, the world is messy. It’s not the black-and-white comic strip your father fed you. Heroes and villains are lies for children.” Her breath catches, the faintest rustle against the receiver.

He asks her, was it worth it? Really worth it? He doesn’t add ‘you bitch’ because it sounds wrong, even to his own mind. There has to be a line somewhere.

“Ask your brother that question,” Bela replies, and he hears the crunch of a severed line.

*

The kid is seventeen. Barely.

“Ugh,” says Dean, wiping the blade on the kid’s hoodie. Sam lets him. He’s transfixed by the vertical pupils, the eyes round and sad, like his mother’s. She’d been a scared teenager too, once upon a time.

“He got me,” says Dean, sharply, like he’s reminding Sam of a still-burning stove. Sam turns away from the boy, from the ringing echo of his fury. He places his hand over Dean’s stomach, where adolescent claws had raked away several layers of skin. Blood trickles over his knuckles, but it’s sluggish; might not even need stitches to stem it.

“Will I live?” Dean asks playfully.

Sam increases the pressure against Dean’s lacerated abdomen, the other grasping Dean’s shoulder. His brother winces.

He tells him, you’ll be just fine, with an emphasis that seems to wound Dean further.

He returns to the kid’s side. He’d fought well, Sam thinks, moved like the predator he was. Too fast to be willing to negotiate. Sam can’t blame him for his savagery, though. He’d done much worse for the same kind of vengeance.

He spots a glint of silver, hidden in the folds of the kid’s shirt, and nudges it into the light. A moon and a star. He must have taken it off his mother’s body. Sam thinks about snapping the cord of the necklace, and taking it with him, but it would be nothing more than desecration. More mutilation.

 _This is Jacob._ She’d been defensive, yet proud. Even cautiously hopeful. _My son._

He was brave, he would have told Amy, pathetic though he might have sounded. He was a fighter. He was just like us.

*

“That should be you up there,” says Dean, as Charlie’s bones blister and burn.

It should be the both of us, Sam doesn’t say back.

*

Jack’s fading fast, crumpled up in his bed like a child with a fever. Nowadays the most Sam can do is bring him broth and water, or whispered incantations that he’d learned off Rowena; small spurts of magic that are intended to restore stamina, to urge the body through an illness rather than cure it completely. They’re drops in a bucket when it comes to Jack’s rapid degeneration, but it’s something. It’s what he can do.

He’s floundering. He’s not used to grief like this when it’s not his brother in front of him, over and over, one hundred and eight fucking times. That grief settled in his skin. It set up camp in his cells. It followed him, got to be as familiar as the sight of blood, and he was always, always waiting for it with a weapon in hand.

He was unprepared to see it rushing out from nowhere, from the most unexpected source.

Jack whimpers in his sleep, and Sam sits on the side of the bed. He takes a damp rag and wipes Jack’s clammy forehead.

“Nngh,” says Jack, and Sam shifts closer, his heart bursting. He’d never imagined he would have this – a child, his child, a person he helped raise and instruct and protect, all despite Jack’s tumultuous conception, gestation, and birth. There had been so much violence, unforgiveable danger, not to mention a lengthy rehash of the cruelty that brought him into the world. Sam wants to make it better, now. He wants to pour his life into Jack, wants to take every sacrifice that had ever been made to allow him this moment, and give it to him – to his son. His son.

Jack makes another pained noise, and Sam lays a hand on his cheek, alert, present.

“Dean,” mumbles Jack. “Dean, ‘m… ‘m sorry…”

Sam wipes his brow again. He wakes him, briefly, for Tylenol and water, and lets him curl up, back into a deeper and kinder slumber.

Dean had taken him on that day trip, Sam knows, can call the image of an elated Jack and a grudgingly satisfied Dean to mind with ease. Of course Jack loves him. Of course he would call for him.

Sam washes the rag. He cleans Jack’s bucket of vomit. He calls Mary with an update, then texts Castiel, to make sure he’s feeling okay. He sticks his head into the garage and orders Dean to go and get some sleep.

They’re his family. His living family. He’ll be anything they need, if it keeps them that way.

*

Dean points a gun at him, and afterwards chugs whiskey, apologising.

“You’ve snapped me out of worse,” Sam reminds him, though he’s not sure what he means. It’s just something to fill the awkward silence.

Dean doesn’t counter him, simply nods in agreement, almost preening.

Sam drinks. He thinks of Billie, of Amara. He thinks about Chuck, his smug grin and his nervous twitch and the single bead of sweat he’d seen, rolling cumbersomely down his temple, through his sideburns, into his beard. 

He wishes, wildly, so suddenly it makes him sick, that Ruby were here. She had an answer for everything, a reason for everything. She had caressed his sweaty temple and swiped the blood from his upper lip and murmured to him that he was special, that he had a purpose. Saving lives, he’d presumed. Killing demons. _You didn’t need the feather to fly._

“’Nother round?” asks Dean, his consonants slipping.

Sam wants to tell him, shut up, Dean. Shut the fuck up.

His lips curve around a yes. Don’t they always?

*

“Dad told me, after,” Lucifer explains, as Sam cradles his intestines. Lucifer snatches them from his arms, starts flipping them like a jump rope. “About the universe, and the echoes. He said that two rebellions are constants, across reality: yours and mine.”

Sam’s screaming. It hurts his own ears.

“You won’t remember this, Sammy, but you’re nothing more than an automaton with nice hair. You think you had a choice in your pain, or your strength, or your love? I mean – why are you so forgiving? Why the fuck –,” he rips, he shatters, and Sam along with him, “– would you endure this? When it means nothing, over and over?”

Lucifer stills, holds up Sam’s listing head. He transitions to his true form, waits until Sam’s eyes have melted down his face in gelatinous tears. They burn. They burn every time.

“This will never be finished,” says Lucifer, almost apologetically. “He won’t let you die. He didn’t let me.”

*

“I’m over you,” says Chuck.

*

Sam lurches up, to a sound that resonates like clashing cymbals. He concentrates, thinks hard.

“Rise and shine, Sammy,” barks Dean, from the bed adjacent to his. He’s tying the laces on his boot, and indicating the stereo, sitting between them. “Dude,” he says, triumphant. “Asia.”


End file.
